Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday September 10, 2013 @06:03PM
from the hardware-killed-the-software-star dept.

SmartAboutThings sends this excerpt from Technology Personalized:
"Intel has started shipping the fourth generation Haswell chips for tablets, which brings power-efficient processors and hence much better battery life to Windows tablets. According to IDG, Intel has now started shipping new low-power, fourth-generation Core i3 processors, including one that draws as little as 4.5 watts of power in specific usage scenarios. These new Haswell processors could go into fanless tablets and laptop-tablet hybrids, bringing longer battery life to the devices. This is a great news for Windows lovers, who have had to sacrifice performance for battery life (and vice versa) until now. Now, with almost 50% better battery life as promised by Intel for Windows tablets, the OEMs have no real need to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore."

"Now, with almost 50% better battery life as promised by Intel for Windows tablets, the OEMs have no real need to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore." Why would a manufacturer buy an OS nobody seems to want instead of using Android? What's MS's advantage here?

For the exact same reason people have been using Windows for decades. They want to run specific Windows based software. With these tablets running x86 rather than ARM the legacy x86 applications become usable. Assuming drivers and other factors cooperate.

Actually there was NEVER a reason to use Win RT, it wouldn't run Windows X86 programs (the only reason to prefer Windows) and thanks to Apple starting the whole "thin is in" trend with iSliver batteries and more and more powerful SoCs frankly most of the ARM devices haven't been getting great battery life either. I have seen several of the new tablets that can't even get the 5 and a half hours my AMD Bobcat netbook gets, and its running a HDD instead of SSD.

the windows apps are familiar to a lot of people. somewhat of a weak point i admit, since 8 flipped the OS on its head, and there's not many RT apps. but if you just look at say office, it's mostly the same between RT and intel.

"Now, with almost 50% better battery life as promised by Intel for Windows tablets, the OEMs have no real need to come out with Windows RT based tablets and hybrids anymore."

Why would a manufacturer buy an OS nobody seems to want instead of using Android? What's MS's advantage here?

That's the other half of why RT is failing: it isn't Windows (well, architecturally it's pretty close in every way except CPU architecture; but they deliberately throw that advantage away); but it also isn't particularly compelling as not-Windows.

The question that I'm left with is "Did Microsoft fuck up a sincere attempt at making RT actually work, through some mixture of arrogance and incompetence, or was RT just a warning to Intel that if they didn't ship something that would run Windows on a tablet, M

Only real reason would be pen apps. There are a ton of awesome Windows only applications for use with an active stylus, such as OneNote (the Android version only has about 2% or the feature set) or PDF Annotator. Also, for working with multiple documents on a tablet, Windows 8 can't be beat (unfortunately).

As for long battery life with full Windows 8, look no further than Atom. I'm typing this on a Clover Trail Atom tablet right now, and I'm seeing 10-14 hours of straight usage out of a single charge every

No with haswell we are talking about X86 windows. RT is destined for the bin. haswell makes full windows with 100% backwards compatibility in a tablet device a desirable thing. Everything from photoshop to your VB app written a decade ago that you no longer have the developers or source code or funding to rewrite is now viable on a windows tablet device.

I have an Asus TransformerPadSomethingWhateverTheSillyNameIs and it isn't too bulky as a laptop. The main advantages are that it has a really nice screen (1080p and useable outside on a sunny day) and a battery that lasts 10 hours without even trying to keep power consumption down, closer to 15 if I reduce screen brightness and so on. In terms of portability, with the keyboard attached it's twice as thick as the tablet, but the same other dimensions, so it's still easy to slip into pretty much anything that's big enough to carry a 10" tablet.

Android is great in the tablet mode, but it really starts to show that it was designed for phones when you start trying to do real work on it. Switching quickly between applications is cumbersome (e.g. if I'm writing something and want to refer to PDF documents or web pages for reference), far more so than on any other OS I've used (WebOS got this a bit better for tablets and I'm still bitter about HP mismanaging it into oblivion). I can see a market for Windows devices with this sort of form factor, and the whole Metro thing almost starts to make sense to me: when the screen's detached, the Android apps are all quite useable, but when it's attached to the keyboard and trackpad I'd like to have more traditional desktop apps available. That said, I've not used Windows on the desktop since Windows 2000 was state of the art and I've not used Metro except for briefly playing with devices owned by some friends at MSR, so it's entirely possible that I'd find both UIs completely frustrating...

As someone who works with the retail sector, this is absolute cobblers. Retailers are constantly focused on the bottom line, and they will only upgrade when it makes sense for them to. There are tills we support that run on Windows NT4. Yes, they're over 16 years old. No, they're not going to be upgraded anytime soon because they just work.

If that VB6 app is still in use, it's because it works. Why fix something that isn't broken just so you get the latest bells and whistles? This pisses off the support sta

haswell makes full windows with 100% backwards compatibility in a tablet device a desirable thing. Everything from photoshop to your VB app written a decade ago that you no longer have the developers or source code or funding to rewrite is now viable on a windows tablet device.

I don't think anyone is going to use a tablet for Microsoft Office. A tablet screen is way too small for Photoshop or a CAD program, and nobody's going to waste a $1000 license (Photoshop) on a tablet. The only thing a tablet is good for is media consumption, and what programs does Microsoft have for that that isn't already out there, usually for free and superior to Microsoft's?

I watch my sister (a graphic artist) use her tablet instead of her full desktop machine everyday for photoshop. Yes a tablet is not better, But convenience and comfort of sitting on the couch or on the train and using photoshop and her apps far outweighs the disadvantage of a small screen.

Not when you dock it. Add an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor to any tablet with Bluetooth and HDMI out, and you can carry one device that shifts between desktop mode when you're at a desk and tablet mode when away from one.

Not when you dock it. Add an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor to any tablet with Bluetooth and HDMI out, and you can carry one device that shifts between desktop mode when you're at a desk and tablet mode when away from one.

The same could be said about any laptop a decade or more ago, and how many docking stations get sold every year?... [crickets] Yeah, that many. Plus, are you going to lug that docking station (and all the crap you mentioned along with it) around to every desk you are going to sit at? Me thinks not.

You don't need a special docking station anymore. All you need are an HDMI cable and whatever Bluetooth peripherals happen to be on hand.

Wrong and double wrong. In the secure environment of big companies the intranet connections ain't wifi. And most tablets don't do 10/100/1000 easily without a device specific dongle [microsoft.com].

I would not put it past Microsoft doing some OS tweaks that make other OEMs have trouble with this feature on their devices, much the same as the Winmodem and wifi radio chip strategy back in the day to get rid of any possibility of any Linux distro catching on in a hurry. This is why desktops are still the norm in large banks

Docking stations used to be very popular. They largely died out when people realised that they were paying $300 to be able to plug in one awkward connector instead of 3 (USB, video, power, possibly network). Back when they were popular, the keyboard was likely PS/2, the mouse was PS/2 or serial, the video was VGA, and you might have also plugged in a SCSI CD ROM or hard disk. Now, they still exist, but they're called monitors. A modern monitor comes with a USB hub (and if you buy an Apple one, either a

I've been using a tablet (Surface Pro) for the past four months for all my professional work -- coding (I'm a compiler-author on the VB and C# compilers), Photoshop, Powerpoint, Word.

It's a joy to use. I still have my old thinkpad laptop but abandoned it completely in favor of the SurfacePro. I use the stylus for much of my powerpoint and Photoshop work, and I use touch for a lot of Visual Studio and Word and WindowsExplorer work since it's easier and more precise than a trackpad. The screen size is fine fo

I see plenty of "business people" pull out a tablet and use it to make notes during meetings. The fact that it's not ergonomic doesn't matter since all they care about is being hip or something. Having your MS project handy on your tab is enough argument for any project manager to warrant it alone. Since the employer is picking up the tab, a $10 monthly fee for photoshop (not a $1000 price for a static license) isn't a problem either, if they need it for the job. People have allowed ergonomics to go die in

Once they are talking low cost, low energy, everyone knows what's it about. Low cost consumer laptops for people who want to do a bit more than they can achieve with a mobile phone and that means Android.

The other direction is people who want the desktop to be a bit more mobile but they still want to be able to go back to their big screen and multitasking power.

How that approach from two different directions finally merge in the middle, well, manufacturers will be pushing to basically grab M$'s profit

Exactly. Not to mention dragging around a tablet for your powerpoint presentation is much handier then dragging a laptop with a bad center of balance with the lid open to a podium etc.

I think RTs legacy is it pushed touch into the PC market. Haswell will make it so these devices are "real" computers. In a few years there probably will be "power user" level tablets (say 8GB ram and equivalent to a present day i7 Quad) the thickness/battery life of a iPad mini. Docking your tablet and bringing your whole comp

If the usage model of the tablet is mouse+keyboard, then I suppose you have a point (er:).The first failed windows touch/tablets went down this path a decade ago. The usage model is quite a bit different for a fondle-slab than a lap or desk top. That is why an iPad, and increasingly Android slabs work so smoothly.

That juicy pile of apps leave a user experience closer to a juicy pile of something else, unless they are re(written|factored|shuffled|...) to work properly on the device.That effort dwarfs a 'p

You're right that the problem with Windows RT was the black of backwards compatibility, you forget the reason for that problem was Microsoft,not the ARM chips. Anyone could recompile their code to run on ARM, MS did it for most of Office after all. Those programs that could not, or would not be re-compiled could be run on an emulation layer (a bit like DOSbox still lets me run old games).

The problem was that Microsoft in their wisdom decided that Windows RT would be a new tablet where you could only install

Exactly, we're talking about Windows RT which is going to die because Intel now have low power processors that can run "real" Windows and legacy apps with no real drawbacks over RT. Did you miss the entire gist of the article?

That would be true - and a huge advantage for RT - if Microsoft hadn't tried to lock it down so goddamn hard. Now the only userbase for apps like that are the people who jailbreak their tablets, a market niche so small that we've had to recompile practically all of the software we use on them ourselves. The main exception is.NET apps, many of which (anything that targets a recent.NET version and doesn't require third-party native libraries) work flawlessly. ISVs have not, by and large, bothered with the (

There's already an experimental branch of VirtualBox for android (on x86 processors). It's not unfathomable that you could run an XP VM on your x86 (probably Atom) powered tablet, pause and resume as needed due to battery life.

You can also run DOSbox for Android and boot Windows 95/98 right now. That might sound perverse, but it does provide decent enough binary compatibility to get Office XP running with support for modern MS Office document formats through the compatibility pack and to run the ever popular VB6 apps that seem to be the standard for discussion in this thread.

The point is that tablets can come out with full Windows 8, which would be a game changer. You'd have full PC functionality in a laptop. Buh-Bye both Android and Apple.

In theory, yes. However, the Microsoft marketing department could still drop the ball in a big way, if they overprice it, or force people to use the MS Store, or leave out key features that business wants or...

It isn't "In Theory" or "or if they don't leave out key features that business wants". The devices are dribbling out onto the market NOW, you can install whatever you want on them, they run a standard full copy of windows, no lockdown like RT, it is the same version that runs installed on a desktop.

Yeaaaah... Windows is on the same trajectory as MacOS - the endgame for which is an OS that is married to the hardware (so the hardware, while capable, will refuse to boot a non-approved OS), and an OS that will only accept signed applications delivered through a curated software store.
iOS is the example of this - MacOS is following it, and Windows 8 is following MacOS more distantly still at this point in time. Microsoft wants Windows machines to be XBoxes that can run MS Office.

Like what? Personally, I think the form-factor of a tablet is next to useless, and I'll stick with laptops and desktops,

You might be the only one, these days. In the beginning of the tablet thing, I would have agreed with you... but now my Nexus 7 gets almost as much time as my beastly desktop. My desktop reigns supreme for actual work and gaming (Android/iOS games suck, as a rule), while my Nexus 7 is for sitting on the patio with a cup of coffee while checking my email/news. The Nexus also spends a fair amount of time in the kitchen for recipes, in the living room for quick Googling, etc... I'm not going to use it for editing photos, transcoding video, coding, or typing anything about 200 characters, though.

Now if my tablet could run full-blown Windows, at a good speed (better than a shitty unpowered Windows Starter-only netbook) it would be a very nice thing. Then, for instance, I could have done some basic Lightroom work on my recent trip (the screen would still suck compared to my large wide-gamut IPS panel). My girlfriends Netbook can barely run Picasa, so its flat out. My old 14" laptop could do it, but it is another fairly heavy thing to carry around... A 10" Windows tablet would be perfect.

Hell having a tablet/phone with an OS that doesn't feel like a damn toy would be nice... I'm not just talking about Windows, having full blown whatever distro you want would be awesome. Especially if they were cheaper than Windows 8. And Ubuntu x86 tablet would be perfect. Hell, better, since it could be tailored to hardware (Like iOS or tablet Windows), avoiding Linux driver hell.

But then again, I'd own the Windows 8 tablet (not RT) right now, but for the fact that it is horribly expensive. $1000 for a convenience item is stretching it, especially when it is hardly as convenient as anything else on the market... It weighs two pounds, and has some unimpressive battery life. Fix that, drop the price by half, and then we'll talk.

So I find these sorts of comments interesting. You use your N7 for "checking" your email. Do you use it for REPLYING to email? I find it amazingly annoying to write anything longer than a tweet on a touchscreen, regardless of the input method. The instant you add a keyboard to a tablet, it isn't a tablet, it's an incredibly non-ergonomic mini-laptop with pieces that fall apart.
I have the email client set up on my tablet (currently a Memopad HD7, comparable to N7) and I *READ* email on it but I practically never REPLY to email on it. I save the replies for when I've got a keyboard.
Consume on tablet. Produce on laptop.

For short missives; yes. For long correspondence; no. I mostly use it to sort my mail, flagging things for immediate actions, checking alerts, deleting junk, and such. Later, when time permits, I do the replying that needs more than a sentence or two on my desktop. This works fine, since my morning coffee time isn't for actual work. But it is nice to get the sorting out of the way before actually sitting down and being productive.

Consume on tablet. Produce on laptop.

Pretty much. I don't have a problem with this, though. I don't expect t

Not only do I read and reply to email on my tablet I also write/. posts (in HTML, mind you) with it.:p I don't find it any more annoying to type on than typing in general. Sure, I can type faster on a full-size, physical keyboard, but that's not why I bought the tablet. Would I write a journal article or book on the thing? No. But email and/. posts... if you get annoyed typing that little on a tablet then you probably made a bad buying decision.

Try using Swiftkey -- I tried it after 3-4 other kb apps as a first-time smartphone owner last January, and it beat the shit out of the others at learning my writing style enough to anticipate the next word(s) and interpret what I really mean when I tap/"flow" over the wrong letters. It's still not as fast as my touch-typing, but it's good enough that I at least don't mind using it, which wasn't the case with the others I tried.

just not going to find those for less than $700-800, even in a standard laptop. Yet you want it to cost the same an iPad?

It will come... perhaps not in the next couple years, but within a decade they will be cheap.

I agree, at the current price point it can make sense for some people, but I'm not one of them. While having a handheld x86 computer would be nice to have right now, most of the features it would add over my N7 are convenience features, not must-haves. If I was on the road more there would be a much stronger case for spending 700-800 for one.

From a purely technical standpoint; this makes a lot of sense. Backward compatibility, fewer architectures that devs must target, lower dev and maintenance costs for OS vendors, and so on.

However, I can't say I'm really happy about the idea of Intel gaining even more dominance in the market. AMD is still holding on, but their answer to "low power" is "we can do better graphics than Intel in less power than Intel + dedicated graphics" which is a nice perk but also addresses neither the high end of the PC market (where they can compete on price, but not really on performance) nor the tablet/smartphone/ultrabook end (where they would need at least one and ideally two steps up in manufacturing process to match Intel).

ARM reaching into the tablet/netbook market seemed like a viable competitor; less powerful at its top end than even a mid-range Intel chip, it could operate comfortably in power ranges that Intel had no answer to. Now... not so much, and with the possible exception of legacy devices and really cheap/underpowered computers (RaPis, smartwatches, etc.) ARM risks becoming irrelevant to the "daily computer-using world". I don't care one way or another about ARM in particular, but there should be *something* out there (in reasonable usage) other than x86/x64.

All of that in the new ARM-based "Apple A7" cpu is inside of a damn phone! How many heatsinks and fans do ya reckon are in that iPhone?

Extrapolate all that with your brain head, and think what some GHz scaling with copper heatsinks and fans (etc) could do in a desktop machine? There is not long to wait before we do have laptops and desktops running on RISC architecture again, given these new published specs.

Those specs are kind of meaningless without benchmarks. Remember the DEC Alpha, that had a much higher clock-speed than some Intel chips, but still ran slower? It's very hard to compare clock speeds between different architectures, because there are so many other factors that are important. If you want to be sure, you have to benchmark.

The biggest advantage Intel has is in manufacturing (as always). They seem to be on schedule to release chips at the 14nm node by next year, and I don't think other fabs ar

I will let people crap all over a post that's basically regurgitating Intel Developer Forum drivel, and I'm certainly not going to say that WinRT has a future.

But I will NOT let you trash talk Alpha.

The Alpha was simply a much better processor than anything from Intel at the time. It was pretty much the fastest out there, though you might argue with some high end POWER or MIPS 10K or something.

Maybe you were running Windows and x86 programs on the Alpha? Those weren't blazing. But native Alpha programs were fast fast fast. And the architecture is clean and beautiful. Just beautiful.

So you can say that ARM has not much advantage over x86 today. That's probably true. You can say that ARM sucks, has too much complexity, and the system architecture is an abomination. That's probably true also. But you leave the Alpha out of your talk unless you know what the hell you're talking about.

I didn't talk trash about Alpha. I just said (or tried to say) that an Intel processor and an Alpha processor both having the same clock speed will have unequal power (in that case, the Alpha would be slower). But the Alpha processors had much higher clock speeds than Intel chips of the day. In other words that wasn't a valid way to compare performance.

GP is not entirely wrong. The early Alphas, like the 21064 did relatively few operations per MHz; later on when they got to 4-way out of order instruction issue, not so much. By the end of it's life, I think Intel was clocking faster then Alpha but getting less per clock cycle.*

*Depending on whether you were talking Int or FP, and all sort of other things. YMMV.

I actually know a guy who worked on the NT port (back when it was called "Windows NT", and this was shortly before he left MS for good) for Alpha. He still has the email from when his team supplied it to the test team, which had until that time been working mostly on x86, which said (of Windows on Alpha) "what kind of rocket fuel are you running these things on?" in reference to their speed.

DEC screwed the pooch on that one, no doubt; they priced it as a high-end workstation chip, and lower-priced commodity PC hardware running x86 ate their lunch.

They claim 4.5 watts for the low power usage scenario. ARM will be with us for a long time. The ARM folks are climbing the feature/performance curve too. Don't worry about AMD, they are bringing out ARM chips too. Including the ARMv8, aka. ARM64.
AMD describes more fruits of ARM embedded partnership [pcworld.com]

Seriously. 4.5 watts is easily an order of magnitude higher than what you'd get from a power-efficient ARM SoC in the same scenario. Heck, 4.5W is higher than the PEAK power draw of many ARM chips. For scenarios like playing an MP3, mobile chips can measure more like 30 mW - over 2 orders of magnitude lower.

If what I'm doing is playing an MP3, what good does "orders of magnitude faster" do me? Do I hear my music played back an order of magnitude faster? (Assuming I were to buy that estimate, which I don't: Faster, maybe - but I'm guessing 1 order of magnitude so - these are 11.5W parts running at about half the clock speed and low voltage so they only consume 4.5W. I wouldn't place a bet on who would win between a mobile ARM SoC at ~1.9 GHz/~3W and one of these at ~800 MHz/~4.5W. It might very well be the ARM

The difference hardware-wise between Surface RT and Surface Pro is significant. The RT is still fairly light and easy to carry around. The Pro is significantly larger and heavier due to a larger battery and more cooling capabilities built in, and still has less battery life. In fact, the additional size and weight was sited as one reason why the Pro wasn't any good as a tablet. Cutting the thickness and weight of tablets is not just a packaging and shipping advantage.

The only way for x86 chips to reduce both heat and power consumption on load (because face it, if the processor heats up significantly at max load, an additional cooling system would have to be included in the machine's design) is to cut performance. And given x86's overhead, that'll never truly be able to compete with ARM.

Of course, RT is plagued with numerous software and hardware problems and probably was dead on arrival anyway. But new x86 chips are far from being the reason it hasn't and won't take off.

That Intel chips become more energy efficient have more implications than giving the last shot to a dead platform that Microsoft killed pretty efficiently already. In fact, could push more into oblivion Windows (RT or not), as could push other ecosystems that could become mainstream where Microsoft don't have presence or meaning at all, like in wearable computing, or pretty cheap devices where it would be better to install some linux derivative than paying the microsoft tax that cost more than the device itself.

Microsoft's policies with the Surface had everything to do with killing RT. They couldn't have better engineered Surface RT to fail if they tried.

Confusing name - identical to a product the same size and shape and not at all the same thing that is released at the same time. WTF?Inferior screen compared to Surface ProWindow 8Missing "Start Menu" being replaced by "Start Button"No initial boot to desktopApps are only available through the market and with a minimum $1.50 chargeNo side-loading of apps.No backwards compatibilityNo ability to load anything that isn't approved by Microsoft. All of the disadvantage of Apples walled garden with none of the glamourPoor CPU choice to begin withNot enough RAMPoor heat managementThe price was far too highNo ability to join a domainCan't legally use it for work if you read the licenseMetro should have been an option and never a forced interactionThe worst thing of all was that Microsoft blatantly ignored their users feedback about Windows 8!This arrogance left a bad taste in the mouth of many and word of mouth killed the Surface RT.

Microsoft could have made a killer Surface RT that would have done very well if they hadn't been so arrogant. The attempt to force their "market" and the Metro interface - whatever the consequences killed the Surface. By the time Haswell came out Surface RT was already dead, lost along with a few million missing tablets in a warehouse somewhere.

Oh, I don't doubt that MS fucked up RT pretty hard, though whether that was intentional or not I really can't say (I doubt it was; too much damn money down the drain). However, your list is so wrong it's hilarious.

Confusing name: The Surface Pro came out months after the Surface RT, the Surface RT has RT right in the name, and everywhere I saw that was selling them the salespeople were very cautious about making sure the customer knew the difference. The bigger "confusing name" problem is probably Windows R

Intel has a mountain of money, the various ARM SoC guys have a pretty large revenue stream (though it's fragmented...). Is it reasonable to say that Intel's money they have to devote to pushing their power usage down is large enough to overcome ARM's advantage, or does ARM have some sort of inherent advantage (+ ARM's supporters' money) that will keep them at least at parity?

Contrarily to what seems to be a popular belief on Slashdot, x86 and ARM aren't the real issue, it's the designs themselves which come from very different backgrounds (large high performance chips where thermals weren't a concern and fans were a given versus embedded processors which had to sip power and hide in small areas). An efficient x86 device is just as possible as a powerful ARM device, and Intel really does have a shot at tablets and maybe even phones. They've been cutting down power usage in a dra

Easy "root" (Admin) shells and file management (and even scripting, which is a form of legacy compatilbiity that it does support). Multiple user support. Multiple monitor support. Hardware peripheral support. Windows networking (Homegroups, printers, etc. out of the box). Syncing stuff with your home PC and/or workstation (files, settings, purchased apps, and even app data). Office. Flashplayer (full, desktop-equivalent version). A browser with full dev tools (less than Firefox plus a full load of extension